Maneuvering Through the Academic Article Writing Process
Last summer, Adam Howard, Pat Dickert, Sam Jefferson, and I spent nearly a month in Taiwan conducting research on global citizenship at an elite private school. Each of us had general areas of focus, mine being parental involvement. I had no idea what to expect from our research findings and was eager to see what I could draw from the students, faculty members, and parents that I interviewed. However, as we collected more and more data and discussed our findings, some commonalities and themes began to emerge that helped me gain a better understanding of parental involvement at this elite school. When we returned home to the U.S., my understanding of said involvement was able to marinate all summer before the start of the school year, when I truly began to make sense of what we had found.
This fall, I began working on an academic article that would flesh out our findings on parental involvement at this elite Taiwanese school. Like most college sophomores, I was unfamiliar with the process of writing academic papers to be (hopefully) published and found the assignment at hand to be a bit daunting. Luckily, Adam was able to walk me through the writing process as he is very experienced in this activity. Even when only able to communicate through facetime at a spotty internet café in Sri Lanka, he was able to answer any questions I had and outline the topics and questions that should be covered in each section.
My first step in the writing process was going through all of our data and pulling out anything that related to parental involvement. Once I finished this, I had a twenty-six page document of relevant quotes from each interviewee. My next step was to go through this data and try to find any common themes that emerged. The themes that stuck out to me were tensions between parents and teachers, girl being more independent than boys, and student’s privilege that stemmed from the opportunities their parents gave them. Adam and I later re-named this themes as unspoken tensions, gender differences, and familial obligations.
Now that I had my three themes and data to support each one, I was ready to begin writing the narrative findings section. Adam explained to me that this portion of the article is typically the longest but easiest to write as you must tell a story about your findings, broken up into three themes, without doing any analysis. My first stab at the narrative findings may have raised some concerns with Adam as I attempted to simply get everything down on the page. But after cleaning up the language and format, I got the thumbs up to begin work on the introduction. I found this section to be most challenging as I had to do a ton of outside research and fluidly incorporate my findings as they related to our research findings from Taiwan. After finding sixteen solid sources and pulling out the quotes that related to our research, I began writing by generally introducing elite Taiwanese parental involvement. I then introduced our own research and provided a rationale for why it was significant and necessary given the larger body of work on the topic. Finally, I concluded the introduction with a teaser of the narrative findings.
Writing the introduction to this article made me realize how knowledgeable one must be about a given field in order to successfully write about it. Before beginning this process, I thought that I only needed to be an expert on our own research but I actually learned a lot about parental involvement norms in both Asian and elite contexts. Furthermore, Adam had me read Flexible Citizenship, by Aihwa Ong, to help me wrap my head around the concepts of flexible citizenship, mobility, neoliberalism, and Asian eliteness so I could expand my knowledge on these relevant topics and incorporate them into the research. After the introduction, I wrote the discussion section where I explained what I thought was significant about the narrative findings and related these findings to Ong’s book. Lastly, I wrote the conclusion where I summed up the big picture argument and takeaway points for the reader.
Upon finishing the first draft of the article, I sent it along to Adam so that he could add an academic touch and make it more publishable. One of the greatest challenges of this writing process was simply learning how to write like someone in academia and having a grasp on the terminology that seems complex and scary at first glance. Once I became more comfortable with that aspect, I was able to think more critically and write more freely as I wasn’t getting caught up on the language as much. Furthermore, Adam showed me the basic layout of an academic paper, with the general purpose and flow of each section, going from introduction to narrative findings to discussion and finally to conclusion. This structure allowed me to understand how each section related to the next and helped me to stay focused on the priorities of each section. Lastly, the order in which Adam had me write each section was very logical and helpful. Beginning with the narrative findings helped me gain general command over our research and helped me organize my introduction and discussion section so that they matched up with the narrative findings when compared to my outside research. I am now beginning to work on a second article about findings in an elite Denmark school with Sam Jefferson. I believe that my experience in the fall and Jan Plan with this first article will help me enormously as I am now much more versed in the skill of writing academic articles.
